


Three Strikes

by iammemyself



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: End of Days, Gen, Other, it's AU-ception, the riddler speaks, this is an AU for the AU aha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-09
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-30 01:51:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8514106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iammemyself/pseuds/iammemyself
Summary: Sometimes, you just don't make it in time.Alternate ending for @waiting4codot’s End of Days arc for The Riddler Speaks, sadistic suggestion from Hermannco, both from Tumblr.





	

‘Three Strikes’

 

Alternate ending for @waiting4codot’s End of Days arc for The Riddler Speaks

Blame goes, once again, to @hermannco

Characters: Riddler, Hush, Scarecrow, Batman

Synopsis:  Sometimes you just don’t make it in time.

 

 

_October 31, 2016_

 

 

The only thing he had left was the dripping.

It was an odd thought, to be sure.  But Elliot had not deigned to drop by in a few days.  He missed that.  Having someone to talk to.  Chatting with his kidnapper was not at all his idea of a good time, but he only had straws left to grasp at.  A shameful position, to be sure.  One he never thought he'd find himself in - Christ, he was supposed to be _better_ than this! - but that was old news by now. 

He had ceased struggling days ago; he'd considered trying again several times to somehow get his hands free so he could attempt an escape, but some of his fingers periodically went numb.  He wasn't always certain which of them it was.  The longer this went on, the less certain he was of anything.  He was pretty certain, though, that he was not going to be able to get free of this rope without the use of his fingers.  That sort of thing required manoeuvring of the type he was... less than capable of right now.

And, of course, he stared the shadow of his host down every time he deigned to show up to gloat, and he stubbornly refused to hold his tongue or otherwise let that man know Edward was faltering at all.  He had never again wanted to be anyone's victim, but if he had to be he would never again play the part.  The days where he lay down and took it were long, long over.  Besides.  He was only tied up here because his host knew he wouldn't be able to take him otherwise.  The coward had to inflate his ego _somehow_.  But it was hard to keep one's spirits up in a situation like this.  Even for him.  He couldn't be blamed for a little frustrated ranting just to hear someone's – anyone's – voice, could he?

He was unable to keep track of how long he’d been down there, because try as he might to use his only companion the annoying leak to calculate it, he kept dropping his count.  Not just because sometimes he managed to sleep for a while, but because his host kept returning to gloat – gloat, like a common criminal who had gotten away with shoplifting their first candy bar! – or because something suddenly hurt terribly from being tied up in the same position for so long, or because he remembered something he really should have done but had never gotten around to.  With the latter he just got so _angry_ with himself that it was impossible to think straight.  You would _think_ a man of his brilliance, his ambition, his _skill_ would have accomplished any number of things by now.  And he’d been trying, he really had, to think of something he’d done that would outlive this humiliating debacle.  But inevitably all he was be able to think, over and over again, was _I hate Halloween._

He was so _bored_ and so _tired._   He really _was_ going to go insane if he was stuck down here much longer.  He wouldn’t have been able to guess before this that being trapped in a room with only his own mind to entertain him would be so…

Well, boring, really.  There were only so many times he could think the same things over and over again without having spun them out into completion.  Once the well of thought ran dry, so to speak, all that was left was memory.  And to be quite honest, a lot of it was… unpleasant.  His mind kept going back to last year, and the year before that, and once those horrendous events had thoroughly played themselves out it didn’t stop there.  No, might as well remember all those _other_ holidays – which he didn’t celebrate, by the way, he wasn’t some plebeian consumer privy to the manipulations of Big Business – all the way back to the early years of his life, just so he could suffer even more in this damp hellhole.  _Where_ was Crane?  He _had_ to have gotten the riddles, hadn’t he?  He was solving them, right?  Edward had been banking on Crane’s reluctance to allow one of the city’s costumed criminals to start picking off the others.  He hadn’t chosen _wrong_ , had he?

Of course not.

His arms, too, sometimes went numb from being kept in the same position for so long.  When they were numb, he decided that was worse than the ache the immobility wrought; when they hurt, he wished they would go numb again.  He sort of wanted to go numb, sometimes.  It would be stupid, so incredibly stupid, to do that.  He could potentially miss an opportunity to get out of there in such a state!  But it was also very tempting.  It was especially tempting at such times when the dripping seemed to grow to a deafening volume and he _could not cover his ears_.

He kept having the bizarre thought that he wanted to go home.  It was ridiculous and he had no idea where it was coming from.  He didn’t _have_ a home, had _never_ had one.  But wherever it was, he found himself wanting to go there.  With the girls, if they’d come.  They weren’t always inclined to do so.  He wouldn’t argue – or he’d do his best not to – if they did turn him down, but _God_.  He just wanted to go _somewhere_ and listen to them bicker over something stupid and base and try to forget about all of _this_ …

He really _was_ losing his mind.  Wasn’t he.

He was made for more than that.  Made for more than just… _mediocrity._   Than the _sameness_ and the _drudgery_ that plagued everyone else out there with minds both large and small.  He didn’t want any part of that.  Usually.

Oh, but average life would be an _adventure_ in comparison to this.  If this was his new normal – and he hoped to hell it was not – there was really no harm in wanting to just… _be_ for a while, was there?

He was lost enough in his damnable thoughts again that he almost missed it: the scuff of his host’s shoes on the rough cement.  He looked up when he did catch it, determined not to let his lapse in judgement show.  This man was so insistent on attempting to get a rise out of him, and so far he believed he had done well in denying _that_ particular goal.  No, no, he would keep his lesser thoughts private and show only the side of him that knew no fear.  There was simply a point where, once you knew there was no way out, there were no further reasons to be afraid.

“Well, Edward,” Elliot said, his voice smooth and controlled as always.  It was one of many, pitiful methods he tried to exert authority with.  He was nothing.  He was a fool, and he would come to find that out just as soon as an escape was determined…

“Yes?” Edward snapped.

“Do you know what day it is?”

“Seeing as you neglected to provide me a calendar or at least something to mark down the passage of time, _a la_ tally mark, I’d have to say I don’t.”

“It’s the thirty-first, Edward.  Halloween night.”

Edward bit his tongue for a moment.  It felt like he’d been down here much, much longer, but it couldn’t _possibly_ be…

“You can only use that trick so many times before it loses all meaning, you know.”

“Oh no,” was Elliot’s response.  “This is no trick.  This is the end of the line, I’m afraid.”

He failed to keep his throat from tightening.  “What are you talking about.”

“It’s the thirty-first, Edward,” the man repeated.  “And you’re still here.”

“What, you can’t give me until midnight?”  There was a way out of this.  There had to be!  He just had to think.

Elliot crouched down in front of him, reaching into an inside pocket of his long coat and removing a phone.  He spent a moment fiddling with it, until he faced the screen to Edward.  On the screen was his blog.

“I think I’ve seen that before.  Oh yes, of course!  I _created_ it.  Are you going to let me have it back now?”

“Your riddles, Edward,” Elliot continued, as though he’d never spoken.  “They didn’t solve them.  Didn’t even try.”

“Impossible!”  The average intelligence of his listeners was about equal to that of a very, very gifted baboon, but… not so much as an _attempt_ at a solution?  Preposterous.

“See for yourself.”  And with a slow glide of his finger he showed Edward the posts recently made.  The cyphers.  Elliot’s taunting.  The riddles.

All of them with zero notes.

“It’s a trick,” Edward whispered.  And he believed that, didn’t he?  Believed it was a lie?  But then why was his voice so trapped, and his stomach so suddenly hollow?

“I’m afraid not,” Elliot answered, standing once more.  “You saw it.  All of your cries for help, ignored by your… doting ignorami, as Dr Crane put it.  You probably would have liked to correct him on that, but… you won’t be seeing _him_ again.  Not that you really care to, do you?”

Swallowing, even solely out of reflex, was difficult.  “Of course I will.  He’s not going to let you start a war in this city.  He can’t get any _work_ done if you do that.”

“He’s not coming.”

“You threatened his life.  You won’t be able to keep him away.”

Elliot laughed.  It made him feel empty, somehow, though he resolved to keep calm.  This was all a ploy.  Elliot was trying to get a rise out of him.  He recorded all of their meetings, ‘for posterity’ he said.  Edward would be _damned_ if the last the world heard of him was a broken man begging for his life.  No, he would stick it out until the end, even if he had to fake every last second of it.  He would not, at any cost, leave Elliot with something to gloat over for the end of all time.

“I’m serious.  He’s not one for riddles, it seems.  He probably spent a few minutes over the ones I gave him, grew increasingly furious with you for being so insufferable and pretentious, and gave up.  He gave up on you, Edward.  They all did.”

It was harder to keep up appearances, upon hearing that.  It reminded him all too deeply of things he wanted to forget.  He’d meant, ever since he’d left his father’s house, to give up on everyone else _first_ , so that would never happen again.  And he’d never really _planned_ to get into this situation, where it would have been prudent to have someone to depend on –

No, not to depend on.  To give him hope.

God, how long had it been since he had _that_?

“You’re lying.”

“Ahhh, Edward.  So defiant, even to the last.”  Elliot tucked the phone back inside of his coat.  “No further need to grandstand.  It’s over now.  They didn’t solve your riddles, didn’t even try.  Dr Crane isn’t coming.  And the Bat… he’s taken care of.”

“That’s not true.”

“Then why,” Elliot said in a low whisper, “why has it taken the great Detective so long to find you?  Surely he could _easily_ solve your riddles and come swooping in to save you, Knight-errant that he is.”

Edward’s teeth ground together.  Of _course_ Batman _should_ have solved the riddles – he always did, in that confounded, infuriating way he had! – but Edward could not say that, could not _admit_ that!  It would just give Elliot cause to believe he had been designing them to be solved with ease, which Elliot had already… ensured he not do at the beginning of this mess. 

“We both know he could have solved every one of your little puzzles without even trying.  If he’d wanted to.  But it seems he didn’t want to.  It seems he left you here.  With me.”  Elliot’s teeth gleamed.  “How does that make you feel?”

Edward focused on consciously breathing. 

“It’s a shame,” Elliot went on, standing and momentarily obscuring the one dim light mounted on the floor.  “You really would have been an excellent addition to the Collective, if your brain weren’t so tragically…”

Oh, he was enjoying this _far_ too much!

“… broken.”

“Interesting words coming from a psychopath who ties people up among the bodies of the parents he murdered,” Edward spat.  With a little more feeling than he’d intended, but Elliot had gone too far.  He was _not crazy_.  How many _times_ did he have to _say_ it?  Broken.  He wasn’t broken.  He wasn’t.  That was a long-ago lie, invented by a different man in a different life.  How Elliot knew all of that was a different question entirely, but not one that needed an answer just now.  The query that required an answer was _how did he get out of here?_  

“Ambition takes different forms, Mr Nygma.”  Elliot sounded nonplussed.  “If I’m correct, your ambition was to hide and answer inane questions from adolescent bloggers while mine was to achieve greater things that would impact the world as we know it.  And… you know what I’ve just realised?”

Edward didn’t dignify that obviously rhetorical question with a response.  Elliot looked over his shoulder.

“It really seems as though the world won’t notice your absence.  No one’s going to care that you’re gone.  In fact… we’ve already proven nobody does.”

Edward attempted to find the lie.  He failed.

It _had_ to be there.  He knew it had to be!  But the facts lined up too well.  Neither Batman nor Crane had appeared, the blog posts ignored… the police no doubt tripped up by their own incompetence.  It looked bleak.  It looked very, very bleak.

It couldn’t end like this.

But it seemed it was.

“It would be rather pointless to lead you by the nose at this point, don’t you think?” Elliot asked, and his tone rang with a smugness Edward remembered all too well on his own tongue.  “It’s your own fault, you know.  Perhaps if you had treated your groupies with a bit more… I don’t know, let’s go out on a limb here and say ‘respect’, they would have been inclined to put their heads together and do something about your riddles.  But that’s not what you did.  You have it put quite clearly yourself: they were part of a social experiment.  If your social experiment was to see if you could alienate everyone possible through the power of your voice alone, it seems to have worked.”

What was Elliot asking him to have done?  Trust and respect a hundred anonymous faces sending him passive-aggressive riddles and vaguely worded insults?  What kind of _stupidity_ would that have been?

And… and he had, hadn’t he?  He _had_ used the blog to ask for their assistance, hadn’t he?  Why wasn’t that enough?  Why wasn’t admitting he needed help enough?  Wasn’t that a sign of respect?  Trusting in people to save your life from a psychopath who wanted to give your brain away?

“In the end, I suppose you could say they used you.  They found it entertaining when you answered their silly questions and when you needed them to do something for you… they turned away.”

Why was he making so much _sense_?  Edward was trying to think of a way out of this, out of this line of manipulative thinking, but Elliot’s voice was all he’d heard other than that damned dripping in _weeks_ and it just echoed and echoed inside of his head –

“They used you.”

He should have expected that, really.  The answers to the questions amused them, for some reason, but only for a minute or two.  The denizens of the Internet were fickle, and were more prone to dally about on video-streaming sites containing six-second vignettes than to spend some time working through riddles.  For someone they didn’t know.  Who professed not to care about them at all.

He’d… he’d really gotten himself into this all on his own.

“But it’s all right.  Because you were using them.  So it’s all very symbiotic, in the end.  Isn’t it, Edward.”

He knew what was going on, now.  Elliot was just spelling all of this out so that he could feel terribly, horribly alone right before his doubtless slow and painful death, and… and it was working.  He hated it, but he could not keep his breath steady or his chest from aching or his mouth from remaining dry.  That was the end.  His humiliations, lined up one after the other, recorded for posterity.  And he didn’t even have to say a word.  His absent voice said everything.

Elliot crouched in front of him again, and he laid a gloved hand alongside Edward’s jaw.  His unkempt beard stove off the bulk of the cold leather, but still he had to suppress a shudder.  He didn’t want touched.  Especially not now.

Elliot tilted his head up, oh so slowly, so that their eyes met.  He was so close that Edward didn’t have the ability to look away.

“There are so many people,” Elliot whispered, a corner of his mouth curling, “who will be so glad to be rid of you.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Edward said.  He hadn’t meant to, hadn’t planned it, but the words emboldened him a little.  Elliot was right.  He was right about all of it, every single bit. 

Did it matter right now?

No.  Elliot’s goal was to humiliate him for posterity.  And he would fail.  He would fail, because he had underestimated the resolve of Edward Nygma.  He hadn’t escaped.  No one had come for him.  And that was hard to bear. 

But he wouldn’t be bearing it for that much longer anyway.

“You’ve just been talking to hear the sound of your own voice.  Much as I’ve been said to do, by the way.  Did you think you were going to _get_ somewhere with that impromptu psychoanalysis, Elliot?  Did you think I was going to sit here and cry while you detailed what an awful person you think I am?  I’m not stupid, if you hadn’t noticed.  You failed.  You failed in your own mission, and your little speech was an attempt to make yourself feel better.  I’m glad I’m too ‘broken’ for your Collective, Elliot.  I have no desire to share any of my considerable knowledge with a spineless toady like yourself.”

His voice wasn’t as strong as he would have liked, but hell.  His mouth was entirely dried out and Elliot was a foot from him anyway.  His thumb moved around Edward’s chin as he tightened his fingers against Edward’s jaw, and it hurt.  It really did.  But Edward stared right back and clenched the fingers he had feeling in to hide that it pained him.

“I’ve had quite enough of your talking.”

“And _I’ve_ had quite enough of _yours_.”

Elliot stood. 

Edward worked feeling back into his lower jaw as subtly as he could.  His pulse was still erratic, somewhere in his throat, but really… no need to panic at this point.  It was over.  He’d regained control as best he could.  He wasn’t going out in quite the blaze of glory nor the peace of retirement he’d planned on, but since those were out of the question no need for regrets. 

And when he thought about it?  No need to believe a word Elliot had said. If Edward wanted to go out blissfully ignorant and in denial, that was his own damned business.

If denial was even required.  Wouldn’t it be _just like_ Elliot to _lie_ like this?  To pretend it had all been for nothing, in a juvenile attempt to mess with his head?  He had shown Edward the blog, sure, but there were many ways to hide things on blogs and Edward knew all of them.  Elliot was a liar _and_ a cheater, the _worst_ kind of person.  Elliot was trying to break him and it was not going to work.  Edward had him all figured out, now.  Used and abandoned, as if!  There was a symbiosis indeed, but it was not that of one group using the other.  Edward entertained his listeners just as much as they entertained him.  He had said some things about them that were not flattering., he knew that.  But they were looking, he had no doubt of it.  There was no way in hell they would turn away and leave him to die.  They, too, were smart enough not to take every word at face value.  This current situation had nothing to do with their efforts, nor Crane’s, nor his.  This was Elliot, cheating, and that was all.  His listeners hadn’t failed him.  They had been _succeeding_ , and Elliot had cheated in order to win.

Elliot’s hand removed a pistol from another hidden breast pocket.   

Crane was coming.  That was also a certainty.  The man was almost as determined as he was.  He wouldn’t find what he was looking for.  So Edward would to give him something else to find.

“May I say one last thing?” Edward asked as casually as possible.  “I know no one out there is listening.  But posterity, and all that.”

“Very well.  I suppose it would be impolite to deny a last request.”

Edward looked up, past the dully shining barrel of the gun and into the gleaming points marking Elliot’s eyes.

He only hoped someone would find the recording and let him glean a victory out of this damned mess.  The words were useless otherwise, but he had nothing left to lose.  Nothing left at all.

He took what was probably his last breath and began to speak.

 

 

_November 1, 2016_

Jonathan Crane had to catch his breath at the bottom of the stairs.  Why did it have to be _stairs_?  He’d been through enough of this ridiculousness to last him a lifetime.  He would say Edward owed him several times over, but all Jonathan wanted out of him right now was for him to keep his distance.  And his mouth shut.  He knew which of the two he was more likely to get.

It was damp, and there was one light in the room.  Positioned against the far wall, it barely penetrated the shadow.  An emergency light, perhaps.

“Edward.”

Jonathan had spent much of the last pair of weeks half-hoping this was some sort of wild joke, and that Edward was playing one of his games and Jonathan had free reign to slap him very hard once he’d been located.  Trouble was, Edward had been silent.  As in, his voice had not been heard in a long time.  Given that was Edward’s favourite sound, Jonathan was inclined to believe this was not a hoax after all.  Someone _had_ gone after Edward, and _had_ gone after the others.  Had gone after Jonathan himself.

Scythe gripped in one hand and the other trailing along the wall, Jonathan moved deeper into the dark.  Who knew what was over there.  There were plenty of rogues Jonathan had not yet run into, and any one of them could be hiding in the dimness.  He hoped there was no one, but that only meant this was another dead end.  And he was sick of dead ends.

It was hard to see, but… was that… a _body_ , in the corner?  Jonathan readjusted his fingers on the shaft in his hand.

He stepped close enough that the light gave him the ability to discern the shape properly, and somehow the weapon slipped out of his hand.  The rough cement shone dark and wet.

“Edward,” Jonathan breathed.

He was tied to a chair of a construction Jonathan couldn’t quite see, body held upward only by a coil of rope wrapped several times around him.  His slump was peculiar, but more disturbing… it was not a position he’d ever seen Edward in before.  He crouched down in front, leaning on his good leg.

Jonathan hesitantly reached forward to raise his head; not because he had never seen such a scene – it was impossible not to have, in his old line of work – but because he didn’t want to know. 

But the skin there was cold, unnaturally so.  There was no heat in this body, and judging by the mess on the floor, no blood in it either.

No life.

“Dammit,” Jonathan muttered to himself, and one fist ground itself into the floor as his other hand rubbed against his face.  It wasn’t right.

They had all tried so hard, all of them.  That team he’d been in contact with, the efforts of the splinter groups and the smattering of individuals; all of it for nothing.  All of it useless.  He had gone through all of this – they all had – and it was too late.

“He’s dead,” Jonathan called out.  His voice rang with discontent.  “We’re too late.”

“I’m sorry,” came the voice from the shadows.  Jonathan frowned at him.

“For what?”

“Not figuring it out in time.”

“He could have left clearer clues.”

“Perhaps,” the voice said.  “At this point, we can only guess the circumstances of the riddles.”  He stepped forward, though Jonathan knew this only because of the scuffling of his boot heels on the floor.  “But I would prefer not to get in the habit of criticising dead men.”

He had something of a point.

Jonathan reached for the scythe and, once he had it in hand, used it to aid him in standing.  He had broken his leg for nothing.  He had done all of it for nothing.

He did not like the taste his failure left in his mouth.

“Keep this,” the Batman said, and Jonathan did not have a chance to ask before an object was pressed into his hand.  A cellphone.

“What do _I_ want with it?”

“There’s something on it you need to hear.  More than the police do.”

They exited the crypt in silence, and once back into the somewhat clearer air on the outside the Batman turned.  “I’ll track down Elliot.  He can’t have gone far, and his game is up.  You’ve done enough.  More than anyone else would have done.”

And somehow not enough, regardless.

He didn’t know why he was so _bothered_.  He held no love for the man, who would doubtless have been irritating and ungrateful even if Jonathan _had_ arrived in time, so why did it _matter_ so much?  Edward would not have returned the favour in any way.  He would have turned up that nose of his and scurried back to one of his boltholes to sulk and garner as much sympathy for his plight as possible.  He would have been his usual insufferable self, and Jonathan would have regretted looking for him in the first place.

But it wasn’t just about the two of them, was it.

It didn’t matter what the outcome would or would not have been.  Jonathan had led Edward’s followers to believe they would all find the man together.  In one piece, alive.  He had not only failed himself, not only failed Edward, but he had failed the first people to put trust in him in a very long time.  He didn’t know them, and they sent him a great deal of odd messages that quite frankly made his head hurt, but he had to start somewhere.  And he hadn’t quite _squandered_ that trust, but… he had not quite lived up to it, either.

They were going to be devastated when he told them.

 

 

He quite forgot about the phone until he’d been in the hospital a day or two – it was hard to tell when he was on _that_ many painkillers – and he was clear-headed enough to take a look at the table next to him.  There were two phones there.  One of them his, and the other… that, he didn’t know.

He looked at his own first; he hated the thing, but it had been deemed necessary by his supervisor at the Asylum for some reason he hadn’t paid attention to.  He had to admit it had been useful for the little scavenger hunt he’d been put through.  Not that it had ended up mattering.

There were a few hundred messages on his phone from various people of the Internet, sending all manner of panicked messages and good wishes and… memes.  Why was it always _memes_?  He didn’t know how to answer them just yet.  _He_ was fine.  As fine as he could be right now.  But he wasn’t who they wanted to hear from.

To distract himself from having to deal with the onslaught that would inevitably fall on his shoulders once he’d made the announcement Edward Nygma had not been saved, he picked up the other phone.  It did not contain a passcode lock, which was odd, but he supposed Batman had been through it first and had disabled it.  The lock screen was replaced by a file from the voice recorder.

Right.  Batman had said there was something he needed to hear.

He sat, and he listened, and he grew incensed enough with the lies that he was about ready to abscond from here and snatch Hush right out from under Batman’s nose.  Jonathan understood as well as anyone the merits of manipulation as a tool, but outright _lying_?  What had he done, made a false blog and shoved it under Edward’s nose as proof of his abandonment?  There were _hundreds_ of notes on his posts!  Hundreds!  Of every kind possible from across the globe.  What an _amateur_ Elliot was.  What a _shame_ to the masters of the craft.

Edward’s silence, usually extremely welcome, was unnerving in this context; if Elliot really _had_ gotten to him it was definitely not anything Jonathan needed to continue hearing.  But as he listened, it came to light that Edward was smarter than that.  Of course he was.  Jonathan would neither deny his intelligence nor admit it to his face, not that either of those were options any longer.  He was wondering what the point of Batman’s passing of the phone had been until he heard Edward say,

_“May I say one last thing?  I know no one out there is listening.  But posterity, and all that.”_

_“Very well.  I suppose it would be impolite to deny a last request.”_

_“Listeners, I know you’re out there.  You always have been and you always will be.  And I want to tell you, sincerely: I don’t blame you.  I don’t blame you at all.”_

Now he knew exactly what to do. 

Maybe he had thought too harshly of the man; perhaps he had had a modicum of sense in his mind after all.  It was extremely unlikely, of course, but it was as Batman had said.  No need to get in the habit of criticising dead men.  Edward never needed to know Jonathan had almost given him a compliment.

He picked up his own phone and manoeuvred his way to the prudent app; he stared at it for a few minutes as he gathered his thoughts.  They had failed, yes.  They had all failed, all of them, together with Edward.  And that was fine.  Failure defined only what should be avoided in future.

“I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is, I did locate Edward, but unfortunately… he is no longer with us.  Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, these things happen.  All we can do now is learn from it, and move forward.  It won’t be easy for some of you.  But you all went into it together and you can all help each other come back out.

“The good news is… Edward left us a little something.  I think perhaps it will ease your heart a little bit.  I hope it does.  But keep in mind as you listen: he did not give up, and neither did you.  That is something you and the… great Edward Nygma have in common.  You can be proud of that.” 

Saying that was not easy.  But at this point?  It was the least he could do.

 

 

**Author’s note:**

**Codot, I realise these characterisations might be softer than yours; I apologise if that’s the case, but I didn’t see the harm in it if it was an AU ending.**

**I don’t like this title but I mean it was his third Halloween and three strikes he’s out so… ((my last title wasn’t any better tbh))**

**So something I liked about this was that Edward never faltered.  He didn’t give up and he didn’t _shut_ up.  He just kept believing there was a way out.  “That’s because he was delusional, Indy!”  Yeah, possibly, but that rings kinda hollow for me so I will just be delusional myself and pretend.  And I mean, he was down there for almost thirty days with just Dr Elliot and maybe Clayface for sometimes company.  That’s a long time and you would have to be hardcore delusional not to be at least somewhat hopeless after all that time, and Rids being hardcore delusional just makes me sad.  So ssh I’m pretending.**

**I don’t actually remember when ‘doting ignorami’ was said so if that doesn’t fit there that’s my bad.**


End file.
